A Different Person by James Merrill and Hilton Als

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A Different Person

Name: A Different Person
Price: 18.00 USD
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Author: James Merrill, Hilton Als
ISBN: 9798217007677

Paperback $18.00

Published on Mar 03, 2026 | 256 Pages

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$18.00

Published on Mar 03, 2026 | 256 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

The son of extreme privilege who became a great American poet—winner of every major poetry prize, from the Pulitzer to the Bollingen—looks back on his coming of age as a gay man before Stonewall in a charming, searching memoir that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, featuring a new introduction by Hilton Als.

“Stands with Merrill’s finest work.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

James Merrill, the son of Charles Merrill, a founder of Merrill Lynch, sailed for Europe in 1950—in part for the immersion in high culture and the art, in part to escape his divorced parents and their prying eyes, as well as the stifling round of their South Hampton-NYC society. Jimmy flings himself on this European adventure, setting up house with a lover in Rome, meeting Alice B. Toklas, and navigating his crucial, sometimes comic sessions with the ex-pat psychoanalyst Dr. Detre, a wonderfully measured presence who helped the young man on the couch strive toward shaping the “different” person he hoped to become.

The sixty-something Merrill who wrote this iconic memoir allowed his young self to take center stage, not hiding his foibles, but entering with his elder voice in italicized paragraphs here and there, to provide revealing commentary that revises his callow judgments. A book about the rocky and tender journey to (gay) adulthood, all the more lasting because it is not narrowly conceived as a book about a poet; it is the tale of a questing young man who seemingly has everything but knows it isn’t much at all without enlightenment, belonging, and self-understanding.

“As in his poetry, Merrill’s writing is rigorous, with a high aesthetic polish, yet also deeply intimate and funny.” —The New Yorker

“Merrill’s prose style [is] a smooth composite of wit, elegance, and grace.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Absorbing, intelligent, and tender. . . . [Merrill] has a Proustian awareness of time and of the bittersweet perceptions and misunderstandings that the young and old bear for one another. . . . Merrill’s prose, like his poetry, is eloquent and elegant.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“What emerge in these pages is a portrait of a young aesthete, devoted to opera, to poetry, but above else to himself. . . . Its graceful prose and wistful, almost elegiac, tone contribute to an overall sense of wisdom geared from experience.” —The Plain Dealer

“Elegant and perspicuous.” —The Boston Book Review

“Merrill . . . is a national treasure. . . . A canny and innovative approach to memoir as a form. . . . This burnished and inventive memoir shows him as one of its contemporary masters.” —The American Spectator

“Compelling. . . . Beautifully written with insights into love and passion. . . . Merrill’s prose is nacreous, with some of the finest pearls concealed in subordinate phrases and incidental figures of speech.” —The Washington Post Book World’

“The most dazzlingly paradoxical writer in contemporary American poetry and prose. . . . This memoir traces James Merrill’s sometimes painful but aways hilarious efforts to trade in the family drama for the human comedy.” —Edmund White

Author

James Merrill

JAMES MERRILL (1926-1995), one of the foremost American poets of the later twentieth century, was the winner of two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the first Bobbit Prize from the Library of Congress. He published eleven volumes of poems, in addition to the trilogy that makes up The Changing Light at Sandover, as well as two plays, two novels, a collection of essays and interviews, and a memoir. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Author

Hilton Als

Hilton Als is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He has received numerous awards, including the New York Association of Black Journalists’ first prize for Magazine/Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment, a Guggenheim fellowship for Creative Writing, a George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize. He is a Professor at Columbia University’s Writing Program, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

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A Different Person

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By James Merrill and Hilton Als

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